Joseph and all his brothers

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Movie
Original title Joseph and all his brothers
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1962
length 81 minutes
Rod
Director Erwin Stranka
script Karl Georg Egel
Wolfgang Kohlhaase
production DEFA
on behalf of the DFF
music Georg Katzer
camera Roland Graef
cut Bärbel Weigel
occupation

Josef and all his brothers is a DEFA feature film by Erwin Stranka from 1962 and commissioned by the German TV broadcaster .

action

Josef has a hard time in his life. Even his baptism goes wrong because his buttocks instead of his head come into contact with the consecrated water. Then he inherits an educational book from his late father, but the last 30 most important pages are missing. The result are the triplets he conceived , who were born in 1947 and for which he also had to pay alimony . Time goes by, he doesn't feel like working, but he needs money. At the regulars' table in the pub he visited , he told the friends there, each of whom had been sentenced to at least six years in prison in the past , that he had a sure plan of making too much money. It is the most important one safe not to crack on site but to transport a car to a safe location and open it only there in silence. Josef convinces the others of his plan and is on the day Schmiere. But he has the transport car stolen and calls the German People's Police to pursue the thief. At that moment his buddies come out of the house with the stolen safe. The result is nine months imprisonment for him and a little more for the others who did not make life in prison easy for him.

Back in freedom, he immediately has a new idea to get money. In the city ​​of Berlin , divided by four-power status , Josef reports to the English military administration in West Berlin and asks for support for East Berlin prisoners . Here he is asked to actively participate and is given the task of photographing Soviet military objects. He was arrested but released after 14 days because the film was not exposed. The British clients are also disappointed and fire Josef without taking on the expenses he has asked for.

In his local bar he meets Lucie, who talks about a school friend who works in the telephone switchboard in the People's Police Presidium. This leads him to report to the American military administration and report on his extraordinarily good relationships with East Berlin employees in sensitive switchboards. Here he also receives his first financial advance on the information to be expected. At a meeting with the operator where he wants to recruit her, she disappears without words, but reports him to the GDR authorities . He was imprisoned for 30 months for attempted espionage. After his release, he immediately reports back to the Americans, but they can no longer find his case in their files because he was too little a light.

With the last of his money, Josef goes to a West Berlin pub and meets his old friend Lucie, who now works in a brothel . Here he also finds a bed for the first night. Lucie tells him that she also has customers from the East that she gets from so-called smugglers. Josef gets a new idea and Lucie's brother places him with the French military administration. In the former rooms of the brothel, an all-Berlin relief office is being built under his direction to collect information for the French secret service. He also gets his own driver, called Clemens, who is also responsible for Josef's safety and with whom Lucie falls in love immediately. Now he is looking for employees to bring the East Berlin informants to him. But they want more money for every Ostler brought in than Josef wants to pay, and even parties that go on all night do not bring any success. Now the French are slowly getting restless because Josef's company is not producing any results. In addition, he finds Lucie on a lounger with Clemens. After Clemens is thrown out of the apartment by Josef, he moves to East Berlin, where his girlfriend lives, but to whom he is actually not allowed to go as an employee of the French secret service. When he left her apartment, he was arrested by the GDR authorities.

So it happens that Josef's collaboration with the French does not bear fruit either. That is why he wants to offer his experience with the secret services to a newspaper in the form of his memoirs . But the editor shows no interest, but plays the tape recording of the conversation to the French, who now want to get rid of him for good. With a trick Josef is convinced to take the subway through the eastern sector to the southern part of West Berlin. At the first station in East Berlin, Josef is taken off the train by plainclothes officers and repeatedly put in prison. Only after the building of the wall is he released and deported to the west. Here Josef learns that for the last few years in the East Prison he was a martyr for West Berliners and that the children put candles in the window for him. That gives him new strength.

production

Josef and all his brothers was shot by the Albrecht-Produktion artistic working group as a black and white film under the working title Josef und die Ostpenner and was first broadcast on June 17, 1962 on German television. The dramaturgy of the film was in the hands of Hans Kohlus . In the opening credits, the title is only written in small letters: josef and all his brothers , which causes problems with the lemma. Therefore the correct spelling is used throughout.

criticism

The Berliner Zeitung read:

“A parody of the bygone golden times for East-West traders whose commercial objects were people. Names like Karl-Georg Egel and Wolfgang Kohlhaas as authors promised an unusual film. But external ingredients could not replace the missing substance, any more than the good cast. The audience remained unsatisfied. "

In the Critique of the New Age , Mimosa Künzel wrote:

“Despite the sometimes quite pointed dialogues and milieu descriptions, the acting performances of Marianne Wünscher as the sensitive street Lucie and Ekkehard Schall as Josef, of Siegfried Kilian, the hilarious Agnes Kraus and despite the original camera positions, the play was unfortunately not one hundred percent successful. There was also the risk of understating and playing down the political situation. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of June 19, 1962, p. 6
  2. ↑ Neue Zeit of June 20, 1962, p. 4